SCHWEINEREI

It must be born. Like a spirit emerging from the cunt.

In SCHWEINEREI, two figures lock themselves away in a bunker. They are twins. They are lovers. They are puppets, performers, spirits of the theatre. Fallen angels. They are repulsive and seductive at the same time. The last descendants of a Europe that has reproduced itself for centuries until it became sick. Behind them lie Versailles, Marie-Antoinette, Mozart, the aristocracy, the theatre. Everything that was beautiful. They have turned it into a paradise. But paradise is rotten. They party while the world outside perishes. They play, eat, make music. Their bodies become entwined. Their embrace turns into a knot. They love each other so much that they suffocate one another.

Then their bodies begin to speak out. What was swallowed up (culture, beauty, violence, guilt, desire) comes pouring out. They break through an inner wall. Inside becomes outside. Their artificial bodies begin to leak incessantly.

SCHWEINEREI is a love letter to the theatre and a reckoning with its ghosts. A state of being. An exorcism.

THE WHOLE GLOBE FOR A REAL SORROW.* Theatre is dead. Long live theatre.

Together with Lucie Plasschaert and Lucas van der Vegt, who plays Mozart on the fortepiano, Lieselot Siddiki builds a bunker that is a palace, a doll’s house, a body and a ruin. A place where past and present can no longer be distinguished from one another.

BORED. FRIVOLOUS. EXCESSIVE. SICK. SO SO SICK.

*from Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller

“Lieselot Siddiki, who previously made a name for herself with Up Your Ass and The Truthful and is soon to move to Toneelhuis, is ready for the big hall – that much is clear. The bunker of her imagination is almost bursting at the seams. The fact that she, as the creator, is on stage herself is a clever move: watching her and hearing her comments on this production in English, French and German makes it so much more than a political nightmare. Above all, Schweinerei also becomes an artistic manifesto. For abundance and filth as a form of resistance against economic sterility. For excess as a break from the tight-fistedness of all our governments. [...] This magnificent feast has both the aesthetic grandeur of La grande bellezza and the unpleasant side effect of gluttony: aerophagia—swallowing too much air—which makes everything feel like a blown-up balloon. So there’s a lot to think about.”
Wouter Hillaert - De Standaard ****

“A hedonistic parable about people who have lost all their magic – and who regret it more than once. [...] Lucie Plasschaert and Lucas van der Vegt are quite different types of performers – she is muscular and boisterous, he is lanky and sharp – but they complement each other perfectly in the role-play they perform as they awaken from their psychedelic comfort. [...] The walls between paradise and hell are porous; indeed, they are crumbling. They have the time of their lives in the no-man’s-land that has emerged: the mouldy nymphs, the Gothic pointed caps, and the character ‘Lieselot Siddiki’, who expects us to share in the fun – perhaps even join in – but who also reproaches us for that very pleasure. Theatre really couldn’t be any more punk than this.”
Klaas Tindemans - Pzazz